Smoking gun stats: GOP election fraud 2008, 2012

Maybe you’ve seen a statistical analysis of election fraud for one state or another (see my 6/14/12 post below), but the paper linked here convincingly shows GOP fraud in both the 2008 general election (to no ultimate effect) and the 2012 presidential primaries. Exception primaries in 2012 are Utah and Puerto Rico.

Figure 6 tells the story for this year’s GOP primary elections. Romney apparently benefited from about 70,000 votes missing from Ron Paul’s total, 500,000 from Gingrich’s, and 580,000 from Santorum’s — a total of over 1,200,000 votes beyond what statistically should have ended up in Mitt’s column.

The technique apparently used is called “vote flipping.” Votes for one candidate are simply transferred to another during the recording or counting processes. In this case, the authors say, a single algorithm was apparently programmed into electronic voting machines across the country.

The vote flipping was discovered by a check of how voting behavior seemed to vary from one precinct to another. Surprisingly, it turned out that a bias in favor of Romney or McCain increased with precinct size. Upon consideration, it makes sense that altering votes is less risky in large precincts, where the large number of votes masks the chicanery.

Figure 7 (from an undisclosed state primary; these are not national figures) shows the effect of vote flipping. In a fair election, vote percentages for each candidate in a precinct remain fairly constant regardless of precinct size, but when votes are flipped, one candidate’s percentage of votes increases with precinct size while the percentages for all competitors go down proportionately.

This analysis may come as a surprise to many Ron Paul supporters, who have understandably come to suspect that just about all cheating leading up to the RNC was directed at Paul. It would be difficult to count all the videos on YouTube that describe or document (often with live video) party bylaws and rules violations, subterfuge, physical assault, disinformation, censorship, illegal detention, and blatant election fraud. But this paper makes a strong case that something in the vote recording or tabulation process diverted votes to Romney from all his GOP competitors.

A welcome vindication for many Paulistas is that the statistical analysis shows why a fair election in the notorious Iowa primary may well have given the victory to Ron Paul. As I view the graph, Santorum’s tally would have been so close that his win isn’t statistically unreasonable, but Paul appears to have enjoyed a small lead in the smaller precincts before his accumulative total took a precipitous drop. If extended in a normal “straight line” trajectory, that would have placed him in first place. Romney should have been a distant third. Judge for yourself:

From these figures it’s hard to estimate what overall damage was done to the Paul campaign. It would be interesting to see how states like Nevada, Maine, and Arizona were affected, for they might have given Paul a CLEAR plurality of support from those states, making it much more difficult to deny him his rightful role at the national convention.

I confess this paper’s conclusion came as quite a surprise to me as well. I have come to view the two parties as two hands serving the same body, and it seems very strange for one of those hands to be so heavily favored.

For those interested in following up on this study, the authors have helpfully shown how to acquire the raw data and how to set up an Excel spreadsheet for the statistical analysis. I should note that other elections can be examined this way